Top Low-Cost Lead Generation Strategies For Startup Businesses

Greater revenues come from greater business generation within your existing customer base, and by adding new customers to your pool. To do the latter, you need to keep on generating leads, and converting them to customers. For small businesses, however, every lead generation strategy comes with two concerns – costs, and ROI. Thankfully, not all lead generation strategies require you to dig deep in your pockets, and still deliver you handsome ROIs. I’ve put together five of these strategies in this guide; read on.

Conduct a Webinar

If you’re in a knowledge business, you can share valuable information with audiences and get then hooked on to your content marketing platforms. To do so, consider organizing a webinar or online demonstration. You can use webinar software like ClickMeeting to do so affordably and easily.

Here are some points to keep in mind:

Work with your team’s most knowledgeable people to create the content plan.

Create a branded landed page for webinar invitations.

Keep the number of entries, and the timeline for invitation acceptance limited, to drive urgency and fear of missing out.

To get the maximum returns on investment for your lead generation campaigns, you’ve got to use channels that your competitors don’t. SMS marketing could be one such channel. Advanced SMS marketing management platforms like TextRequest let you manage personalized, targeted, and affordable campaigns. You can manage all the important variables of your SMS marketing using this service – the frequency of messaging, getting consent from recipients, disclaimers, opt out forms, and language control. Your account can be integrated with your in-house CRM tool, so that you can seamlessly control the customer journey across different marketing channels. Real time, Internet independent, and quick – that’s what makes SMS lead generation a stellar option for businesses.

Targeted PPC

Concerns around click fraud kept aside, PPC continues to be a cost-effective lead generation ploy for startup businesses. Here’s a method you can use to reduce your PPC campaign costs (or improve ROI).

In the Settings tab, you can study your campaign performance across multiple variables, like device, IP, location, timing during the day, etc.

Use targeted advertisements to fine tune your Adwords campaigns as per these variables.

Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) Postcards

For many businesses, particularly those with a localized business model, door to door sales continue to be a lucrative option. However, the evolving social fabric makes this strategy difficult to implement. Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) Postcards are a great alternative. Using such a service (UPS, for instance, offers one) businesses can target highly relevant geographical locations, and get their customized business cards, referral cards, and special promotional cards delivered door to door. This hyper-focused marketing ploy helps businesses lower their costs of lead generation for local brands.

Use Professional Online Networks

Forums, message boards, local web portals, Facebook Groups, or LinkedIn – there are too many online destinations where you can promote your business by contributing useful content. Whether you’re looking for B2B business, looking for networking or collaborating opportunities, or looking for leads via top of the funnel activities, these networks will help you a lot. So, extend your content marketing to specific business relevant groups. LinkedIn Groups, for instance, is a great platform where you can be in the thick of things, among hundreds or thousands of large business potential stakeholders.

Concluding Remarks

A huge component of lead generation success is about targeting your efforts towards the most beneficial audience profiles. Also, it makes sense to explore channels that are easy to ignore for your competitors, particularly in a hyper-competitive market. The five lead generation methods discussed in this guide are based on these two premises and will deliver you low cost and high ROI results.

Jaspal is a web designer and owns a web development company Web Seasoning. He is also an full-time online geek. Follow him on @twitter or sign-up for the email newsletter and get daily updates from this blog.